


Splinter

by Verbyna



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Disturbing Themes, F/M, Jossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 08:58:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The night before she was killed, Irene asked Sherlock if he’d ever seriously considered crime instead of law enforcement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Splinter

**Author's Note:**

> jedusaur beta'd this, thank you! Spoiler-y warnings in the end notes.

How careful we are. The way we watch out  
again this year: not to fall, not  
to subside, not scream, not yet. 

\- Anna Enquist

 

i.

Mycroft stopped talking to Sherlock when he found out about Irene. He’d never been able to pin anything on her, but he suspected enough that he didn’t have to tell Sherlock why all communications ceased when she entered his life on a more permanent basis.

Sherlock was still catching his breath, so he didn't much care about his bother's opinion. 

Chasing her for three years had taken a lot out of him; having caught her (having been caught) wasn’t precisely a reprieve. He didn’t have time to become accustomed to her sleeping soundly next to him, the first person to do so after getting to know him. He did nothing but miss her, before, after, and during; all the time, from the moment he caught a glimpse of her handiwork. 

He didn’t know what she looked like until she kissed him. He didn’t need to know. She was the same all the way through.

Sherlock saw the way she slipped in and out of lines of code, dancing circles around everyone and gleefully cutting under his traps. He knew her taste in art, excellent and vaguely narcissistic, and the clean way she evaded security. She was a knife, and a needle, but most of all, she was never less than herself.

She demanded the same of him. Never punished him for it when she didn’t like it.

 

ii.

Sometimes she would disappear for days. Sherlock didn’t ask where she went, or what she did, because he was a consultant with the police and he liked to pretend that he could separate his personal life from his work.

She’d come back with the same look in her eyes that he got when he solved a puzzle. She’d come back with bruises, with scratches on the palms of her hands, under her gloves. She always came back as soon as she could, even if it meant getting in at five in the morning, just as Sherlock left to see the latest waterlogged corpse washed up by the Thames.

Even when she came back missing two fingernails, he didn’t ask. He knew she expected him to. When he didn’t, she breathed out and staggered forward two steps until her forehead could drop to its place on Sherlock’s left shoulder and he could put his hand on the back of her neck, as gently as he’d ever done anything. They stood in the hall for a long time, ignoring the buzzing of Sherlock’s phone.

The killer got away that time, but so had Irene earlier, just barely. Lestrade was furious about both.

Sherlock really, truly did not care.

 

iii.

Sherlock is bipolar and takes a bit too much of anything that’s prescribed to him; Irene’s father was an alcoholic and her mother a compulsive gambler. When Irene came out of the bathroom after she took the test, Sherlock got both their coats and directed the taxi driver to a private clinic whose owner owed him a favour.

It was over the same day. They didn’t discuss it, and they didn’t hesitate.

Two months later, when he sees all her blood pooled on the floor and grammatically shifts her to past tense, he remembers that night.

Irene was stronger than him. She bled out of the world quietly. And M would pay for taking away her choices, because she’d chosen Sherlock over wisdom and self-preservation and she deserved to live with it.

 

iv.

Mycroft went to the funeral. Sherlock punched him in the face. What was the point in being watched by someone as powerful as Mycroft if he couldn’t keep things like gruesome murder from happening to the only person in the world that Sherlock cared about, himself included?

 

v.

Six weeks. Thirty cases. Cocaine, coffee, oxycontin.

Six months. Six cases. Heroin, sex and a tattoo he won’t remember getting.

Horribly cheerful walls and locked doors in New York, no more rain, no more work.

And, finally, a sober companion at Father’s worst property in the city.

 

vi.

Joan Watson surprises him.

He gets his work back, but it doesn’t scare her away. If anything, it fascinates her. He should’ve expected it: she’s a doctor. She’s not scared of bodies, even if they’re dead.

She doesn’t tolerate his worst side and doesn’t judge him for how socially unacceptable his better side is.

Irene used to hold his face in her hands and search his eyes while he explained his reasoning. She would trace his lips with her thumb and slip it into his mouth afterwards, and he would bite down on it gently and smile at her like a hunter. Like a predator, because that’s what they were together, unashamed and exceptional.

Watson smiles at him as if his intention is to save lives, even when it’s not. She is a doctor. She believes in more than just logic.

 

vii.

“Who was Irene?”

 

viii.

When Sherlock can’t sleep, and there’s no case to keep his mind occupied, and it’s raining outside, and the metallic taste at the back of his throat chokes him, and he begins to forget why he shouldn’t give in to his cravings, he fantasises about what he will do to M.

The opiate craving is stronger than the need to eat during starvation. His need for revenge runs a bit deeper than that, because Irene ran deeper than that. Her absence looms larger than anything heroin can obscure, both when it’s in his system and when it’s gone.

His hatred for M is not an acceptable drug deterrent. He welcomes it regardless. There will be no great relief when M is bleeding and screaming and dying at his hands, but towards the end, heroin didn’t do much for him, either.

It’s the nature of compulsions. Sherlock is an addict.

 

ix.

“You loved her, didn’t you?”

 

x.

Watson is his first real friend. She’s brilliant and she deserves better company, but Sherlock is a selfish man. He always has been.

They get a takeout in the evening and eat downstairs, surrounded by his notes and the hum of their laptops. The conversation runs toward the morbid, inevitably, but Watson is a well-adjusted person, so she brings up mundane things, too. Sometimes she even makes Sherlock care about them.

He’s not fit for human consumption on his best day, but with Watson around, people treat him differently. He treats himself differently. It’s almost enough to forget that he won’t be able to keep this up forever.

Even before Irene, he knew that he wouldn’t die of old age and its sundry humiliations.

 

xi.

It was not Sebastian Moran who decided that Irene did not deserve to live with her choices.

Sherlock wants to kill him anyway, hates him just the same, but he’s the only link he has to Moriarty. And Moriarty, Sherlock’s dark mirror, must be stopped. He must pay, and he must lose just as much as Sherlock has lost because of him.

All his life, Sherlock has been both self-sufficient and imbalanced. Irene made him feel like a person, allowed him to look at people with something other than disdain or fear. She respected his choices, even when he chose to do a line to finish a case. She gave him space on downswings and kept up with him when he was manic, disabled alarms to fuck him in museums after dark and taught him how to smuggle large items through customs without alerting Mycroft. She was not a good person, but meeting her was the best thing that happened to him.

Moran survives Sherlock. Stabbing him is perfunctory. No one but the two of them see it that way, but it is. It’s nothing.

 

xii.

The night before she was killed, Irene asked Sherlock if he’d ever seriously considered crime instead of law enforcement.

“I kept hoping I’d stop thinking about you,” she confessed. They were in the kitchen, and she was so, so beautiful, fresh from a shower, towel around her shoulders like a cape and nothing underneath. “You almost caught me the first time.”

“Did I?”

“You must’ve been two minutes away at most.” She smiled at him, looked away, swallowed twice. “It’s getting harder to leave. No one would tell me if you got hurt. No one would tell you if something happened to me.”

“Nothing will happen to us,” Sherlock said, and waited until she met his eyes. “We’re what happens to other people, remember?”

“London trembles at the sound of our names?”

“As it should,” Sherlock finished with a smile. “Let’s go to bed, I’m not in the least bit tired.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Which one?”

“Did you ever consider a life of crime?”

He didn’t tell her that every day with her pushed him closer to it. He weighed things against each other all the time, of course he did, and maintaining a thin veneer of respectability while Irene and his family paid for the flat grated on him. London wasn’t safe for her anymore - he had thoughts about New York, or maybe Rio, another big city they could call their own. She was American, but she came from a small town in a flyover state; it would probably be New York soon enough. He’d miss London, but he was a consultant and she was a freelance thief. Work would find them wherever they went.

Instead of saying all that, he crowded her against the wall and grinned when she dropped the towel. He bent down and kissed her neck, right where Moriarty would slice it open twelve hours later.

 

xiii.

Irene Adler died during the coldest, rainiest summer since 1988, at the age of twenty-nine.

She was mourned in back streets, at crime scenes, and in mental institutions.

She was missed by one person.

(She was missed.)

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: descriptions of opiate cravings, unplanned pregnancy (terminated), one scene containing heavily implied torture/interrogation aftermath with no long-term bodily harm.


End file.
